Several years ago, I was visiting two of our chocolate-making friends, a couple, in the French Alps. They had been running their business for a number of years, just to close it not long ago. But long enough to know that “we'll see how it goes” is sometimes not a perfectly respectable business plan.

Before it was a Swiss luxury or your afternoon pick-me-up, chocolate was currency, sacrament, and something close to a weapon — invented 4,000 years ago on the coast of Chiapas. The long, bloody, glorious story of where chocolate began, and the maker bringing it home.

Goodnow Farms' Putnam Rye Whiskey unites two New England makers and a Dominican bird sanctuary — a Civil War nail baron, an endangered songbird, and quietly the bar that wins every blind tasting we run.